Fans that directly cool critical components are vital to system health and performance. It’s especially bad when GPU fans stop working since they’re often bespoke and harder to replace than case fans or CPU cooler fans. If you can’t send your GPU to the manufacturer for an RMA (or if you simply want to avoid doing that), we have some solutions that might work for you.

Why is the GPU fan not spinning?

Just because your GPU fan isn’t spinning, it doesn’t mean there’s actually a problem. Many GPUs do not allow their fans to start spinning until they hit a certain temperature — usually 50 degrees Celsius. Even if the fan appears to be spinning very slowly, low fan speeds are usually not a defect or a bug, but rather an intentional choice of the GPU manufacturer. As long as your GPU is running at or below 85 degrees Celsius and the performance is fine, then nothing is out of the ordinary.

If your GPU is regularly exceeding 90 degrees Celsius, gaming performance is much worse than you expect, or your PC has random shutdowns, then there could well be some sort of cooling problem. However, there are many causes for poor cooling: Dried-out thermal paste, poor cooler design, bad case airflow, and/or non-functional GPU fans. If you suspect the GPU fans aren’t working properly, there are many possible causes and potential solutions.

Dust off the GPU fans

It’s possible that there’s so much dust in your GPU that the fans can no longer spin. You’ll want to get a can of compressed air and clean the dust out while your PC is turned off. Make sure to not only get the dust off of the fans but also out of the cooler in general. While you’re cleaning your GPU, you should probably clean the rest of your desktop too, especially if the amount of dust in your GPU was responsible for non-spinning fans.